The Party Center’s intervention in the Fourth Red Army combines with a string of military victories to bring a simmering dispute between Mao and Zhu to a head.
Further reading:
Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji, Mao Zedong: A Biography, vol. 1: 1893-1949
Stuart Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power, vol. 3: From the Jinggangshan to the Establishment of the Jiangxi Soviets, July 1927-December 1930
Joseph Fewsmith, Forging Leninism in China: Mao and the Remaking of the Chinese Communist Party, 1927–1934
Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893-1937 (毛泽东年谱)
Some names from this episode:
Zhou Enlai, head of the Organization Department of the Central Committee
Liu Angong, special envoy sent by Party Center to the Fourth Red Army
Lin Biao, commander of the first column of the Fourth Red Army
Peng Dehuai, commander of the Fifth Red Army
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 117 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
Last episode, we discussed how the Red Army conquered several counties in southern Jiangxi and western Fujian during the spring of 1929. One might assume that, given the relatively successful efforts of the Communists during this period, that during this military expansion there would have been a relative absence of conflict among the people leading the armed struggle. (I know that I would have made that kind of assumption.) But in fact, it was during this period of expansion that a long simmering dispute between Mao Zedong and Zhu De came to the fore and line struggle broke out between the two of them. This episode, I want to dig into what happened with this conflict between the two top leaders of the Communist armed forces.
All the way back at the end of episode 86, where we discussed the unification of the armed forces led by Mao and Zhu De, we talked about how even from the very beginning there had been some disagreement between Mao and Zhu. This disagreement largely revolved around issues of how involved the Party should be in directing the activities of the army, and how much the army should participate in political work beyond their task of waging the armed struggle. Practically, this involved disagreeing about whether army commanders needed to heed direction from party leaders or not, or whether the party leadership should just butt out of many issues having to do with military affairs, essentially leaving the army to the military professionals (with Zhu De being the trained military professional, as opposed to Mao Zedong not having that sort of formal training). One other way this disagreement manifested itself was over to what degree the army, when not engaged in combat operations, should disperse to carry out propaganda work and organizing activities under the party’s direction, as opposed to hanging around and training and getting ready for future combat.
Now, this disagreement had been simmering for about a year, since Mao and Zhu had begun to work together, and in the context of the fresh advances that the Red Army was making, these political differences became more urgent, because every time the Red Army took over a new place, Mao was like “ok, let’s disperse our forces around the nearby countryside and go do propaganda and organize the peasants,” and Zhu De was essentially like “hey, let’s prioritize keeping the army focused on military stuff.”
Now, I don’t want to overstate the differences between Mao and Zhu De. Clearly, they were both united on the need for a military strategy based on creating base areas, and Zhu De did accept the overall need for the party to be in charge of the armed forces. But his idea of what party leadership of the armed forces looked like was different than what Mao’s idea of that was. And there was a certain amount of personal ego involved as well. Zhu De felt that Mao, as party secretary, was trying to do too many things, and that Zhu, who after all was the more experienced soldier, knew better when it came to military affairs, and he wished that Mao would quit involving himself so much in what the army was doing. And, after all, when Mao and Zhu united their forces, Zhu brought many more troops into the 4th Red Army than Mao had.
But Mao and Zhu clearly worked well together despite these differences. What tipped the balance and really brought the disagreement to a head was the intervention of the Party Center in the affairs of the Fourth Red Army.
In episodes 114 and 115, we discussed the exchange of letters between Mao, representing the Front Committee, and Zhou Enlai, representing the Party Center. One thing that we noted in passing about that exchange was that, even though Zhou Enlai ended up deferring to Mao because of Mao’s recent military success, the Party Center wanted to exercise more direct control of what was going on with the Fourth Red Army. In order to exercise that control, the Party Center sent someone to represent the Party Center’s political orientation and exercise the Center’s authority in the leadership of the Red Army.
This person was named Liu Angong. Liu had joined the Chinese Communist Party while he was studying electrical engineering in Germany, and he had met Zhu De while they were both in Germany (for Zhu De’s time in Germany, see episode 80). He also participated in the Nanchang Uprising with Zhu De (see episode 55), and after the failure of the Guangzhou Uprising (episodes 74 to 75), he was sent to the Soviet Union for a year to be trained as an artillery officer. Now, back in China, he was being entrusted by the Party Center to be the agent of the Center’s authority in the Fourth Red Army.
Liu arrived in early May, and immediately took up a position as Secretary of the Provisional Army Committee and also replaced Mao as the Director of the Army’s Political Department. Now, this “Provisional Army Committee” that Liu Angong took over the secretaryship of needs some explanation. The command structure of the Fourth Red Army at the time had the Front Committee at the top, and then the Front Committee gave orders directly to the leadership committees at the head of the different army formations. Now, while the Fourth Red Army had been occupying the Jinggangshan, there had been an Army Committee directly below the Front Committee as a kind of layer of organization between the Front Committee and the different regiments of the Red Army. However, when the Red Army fled the Jinggangshan, in recognition of the need for the Front Committee to be able to quickly and nimbly be able to deliver orders to the organizational layers below it during the extended retreat, the Army Committee had been abolished because in those circumstances all it did was to add an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
But now that the Red Army had begun to conquer new bases areas again, Zhu De had been focusing in on the need for the Army Committee to be reinstated, precisely as a way of insulating the Army from Mao’s demands that the Army engage in political activity. In Zhu’s view, the Front Committee (with Mao as the secretary), would have to give orders through the Army Committee, and then the Army Committee could dilute Mao’s efforts to politicize the army and to make the army engage in political activities other than fighting. Liu Angong, perhaps because of his previous association with Zhu De (and also apparently because he felt a kinship with Zhu because they were both Sichuanese), and also because the Party Center saw Mao as a bigger problem to get control over than it did Zhu De, for all these reasons it seems that Liu immediately took Zhu De’s side and formed this Provisional Army Committee.
But while he took this action more or less immediately upon joining up with the Fourth Red Army in early May, this was just a provisional action until meetings could be held and a proper decision could be reached. That’s why it was a Provisional Army Committee.
The first meeting where this issue was taken up and seriously hashed out was at a meeting of the Front Committee at the end of May. One side began by arguing that ‘since it is called the 4th Army, it is necessary to have an army committee.’ But soon some arguments which more clearly articulated the issue, from the perspective of those wanting to have an Army Committee, were made. The Front Committee was criticized for ‘meddling in too many affairs’ and for creating an ‘over-centralized authority.’ And Mao was criticized for exercising a ‘secretarial dictatorship’ and acting like a ‘patriarchal authority.’
Those in favor of concentrating power in the hands of the Front Committee (and therefore not having a separate Army Committee), argued that while the Front Committee was in charge of overall political work, the center of gravity of its work remained in the army (because of the nature of the mixing of the political and armed struggles), and so in order to retain a ‘centralized and agile’ army command, the system should remain where the Front Committee exercised direct control over army affairs, and that having a separate Army Committee constituted a division of powers that would hamper the Communists’ unified effort.
No consensus was reached at this meeting. So, on June 8 an enlarged meeting of the Front Committee was held, attended by 41 people. At this meeting, which is known as the Baisha Conference because it was held in a town in Fujian called Baisha, the arguments were all made again, but with a much bigger group participating. The results were somewhat mixed.
On the one hand, the meeting overwhelmingly sided with Mao’s (and others’) arguments that the Army Committee was an encumbrance. The vote went 36 to 5 to abolish the Army Committee, which makes it seem that the only people who supported that idea were the handful of comrades who had insisted on setting it up to begin with to avoid going along with Mao’s policies as leader of the Front Committee. On the other hand, Mao was subjected to some pretty heavy criticism in this meeting for the way in which he dealt with subordinates.
If you read Mao’s Selected Works, the Mao that you will encounter there most often comes off, in my opinion, as a kind of very patient and understanding teacher. But apparently, in 1929, in person at least, a lot of people felt that he had been pretty authoritarian and short-tempered in his dealings with subordinates. Looking at everything that the Red Army had been through, with the month-long retreat from the Jinggangshan and all, it’s hard to see how someone would not get testy at times. And aside from the fact that this meeting on June 8 decided to (re-)abolish the army committee, it did not really decide against the various criticisms that Zhu De and Liu Angong had been making of Mao’s insistence that the Army prioritize political tasks and not be overwhelmingly focused just on military affairs. The criticism of Mao at this meeting was serious enough that Mao wrote a letter of resignation, although this may have been a maneuver on Mao’s part to get the other comrades to back down and insist that he not resign. Apparently, Mao said during the meeting that “I cannot bear this sort of untenable responsibility and I ask that you immediately replace me as secretary.”
So, while the Army Committee issue was resolved, the larger issues that were in dispute were still not resolved. The temporary resolution of these issues would have to wait until June 22, when the 4th Red Army held its 7th Party Congress in Longyan.
However, between the June 8th meeting and the June 22nd Congress, Mao had the opportunity to lay out his position in some depth, and I want to look in detail at what Mao wrote. The document that we’re going to look at here is a letter that Mao wrote to Lin Biao on June 14th, in response to a letter than Lin wrote to Mao directly following the June 8th meeting.
Lin’s letter hasn’t been published, but in it he urged Mao not to resign from the Front Committee. In it he also denounced Zhu De’s ambitions, and also Zhu’s efforts to ingratiate himself with the rank-and-file soldiers. He criticized Zhu and Liu Angong for forming ‘invisible cliques’ and wrote that they had ‘egotistically launched attacks on other comrades.’ And it does appear that the political crisis within the 4th Red Army deepened in the days after the June 8th meeting as people who were at the meeting began discussing the leadership crisis among cadres and soldiers lower down in the organizational hierarchy who were not supposed to know about the disagreements going on at the top of the organization.
Now, Mao’s June 14th response to Lin is a little long, but it’s a key document for understanding Mao’s thinking about what it meant for the Army to be led by the Party, or in language that would later become popular, how politics should control the gun. And rather than just expressing this as a platitude, the document gives us an opportunity to understand how this politics came to be articulated not in the abstract, but in concrete historical circumstances and in direct opposition to Zhu De, who would have said that he agreed that, ultimately, in the final analysis if you will, the party should be in charge of the army, but who meant something different than Mao did when he said that.
So, let’s take a close look at this letter that Mao wrote, and which he sent not only to Lin Biao, but also to the Front Committee so that it could be read more widely and discussed:
[MRP3 177-178]
So here, in this introductory paragraph, we can see that Mao is glad that the ongoing dispute with Zhu De has erupted into an open line struggle, so that cadres and soldiers can discuss and debate the issues and reach a higher level of political understanding through the debate and struggle.
Continuing with the letter:
[MRP 178]
Here, in the letter’s second paragraph, Mao lists the 14 points on which he is going to criticize Zhu De, Liu Angong, and their supporters in the rest of the letter below. So, let’s see how he continues:
[MRP3 178-179]
One thing I just want to clarify and explain from this paragraph here is what Mao says about how “The Party dared not attempt to allocate and transfer the guns.” This might be a surprise for people who are used to thinking of armies as having clear command structures that everyone naturally always obeys, and resources can be distributed by leadership in whatever way the leadership wants (allowing, of course, for logistical difficulties). But, as Mao says here, this was not the case for many of the weapons in the Fourth Red Army’s possession. Mao is using this example as a striking illustration of the way in which individualism manifested itself in the Red Army, where if, say, the Party leadership thought that some arms needed to be redistributed from one regiment to another, or to the local militia, this was not always actually feasible because there was a tendency to hoard resources or take a me-first (or my regiment-first) attitude, based, as Mao describes here, both on the survival of individualistic attitudes from life before joining the revolution, and also from the fact that party leadership had broken down in the context of the military defeats of 1927, which understandably reinforced individual self-reliance among revolutionary soldiers at that time. And apparently this was particularly the case with the 28th Regiment of the Fourth Red Army, which was at its core made up of Zhu De’s veterans of the Nanchang Uprising.
[MRP3 179-180]
One thing to note in this paragraph, when Mao refers to “the individual” not manifesting effective leadership in relationship to the August Defeat (see episodes 93 and 94), and to “the incorrect words and actions of a minority of comrades,” he is clearly referring to Zhu De and his closest supporters, but diplomatically not naming him. Everyone reading this would have known who he was referring to though.
The Bailu Conference was that meeting which was held right before the retreat from the Jinggangshan began, which we discussed in episode 100. And we can see here once again how impressed Mao was with the political control that the Donggu base area leadership had over the regiments that were based there, as expressed in how the Party exercised control down to the distribution of individual bullets. For a refresher on that, see episodes 109 and 110.
[MRP3 180-182]